As with the India post I suspect mashups will increase in number in these two locations, and sites like Wikimapia and Sightseeing with Google Satellite Maps will see more locations described and added:

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The Google Maps team has made a huge launch of streets, roads and place names for the country of India! Take a look:

Previous to this launch India showed a vast white space with the "Map" view toggled on making only satellite imagery available. The street maps that have been added for Indian cities also show symbols for various amenities such as hotels, police stations, cinemas and more. This is a significant addition for Google Maps due to the size of the population in India that will be able to take advantage of this new mapping data. Also, expats living abroad can now use the hybrid view to zoom in and look at their home city or town. This expanded data is not yet available for Google Maps API sites, but once it is (and it should be very soon) the following sites should improve their usability and coverage for India. The Google Maps mashup activity should definitely pick up in India as well, now that there is some location context to points which are plotted:

Wikimapia (India) - Individuals will now be able to positively identify structures and places with map and hybrid views put to use. This will greatly expand the number of described places on this great service.

Monday, December 18, 2006

A new feature from Google Maps will help you plan your next roadtrip:The core Google Maps service has improved its directions feature by allowing you to enter more than 2 locations to plot directions between. Now when you plot directions between 2 points a link appears at the bottom of the instructions to the left labeled "Add Destination".Click this link to enter more places to add to your route plotting. It doesn't appear to have a limit for the number of locations you can add and it will also auto-complete places from your 'Saved Locations' area if you have this feature enabled. This looks to be active for most Google Maps countries: USA, Canada, UK & Ireland, Japan, Germany, Spain, France and Italy. Perhaps the next feature addition will help NASA plot directions from Earth, the Moon.. then Mars! :)

Monday, December 04, 2006

Google Map Creator is a freeware application designed to make thematic mapping using Google Maps simpler. The software is part of the GeoVUE project at CASA, sponsored by the ESRC as a node in the National Centre for e-Social Science.

Available as a free download the software enables a user to import a .shp files and export the data overlayed on Google Maps. Using Google Map Creator it is a simple three step process to go from raw data to visualization on your own webserver. Differing considerably from other similar .shp convertors, the software is available as freeware and aimed at ease of use.

In the pre-release stage a variety of thematic map for different parts of the world were produced to test the viability of the application with real data on production web servers. A complete set of help documentation is provided as well as a worked example providing a step by step guide to creating your first Google Map from .shp data.